14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu developer and contributor Simon Quigley recently proposed the removal of Qt 4 support from the repositories of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, following in the footsteps of Debian GNU/Linux.
With Qt 5 being largely adopted by Qt application developers and other major projects, such as the KDE Plasma desktop environment, the Qt 4 technologies are becoming obsolete, so more and more GNU/Linux distributions plan its complete removal from the software repositories.
Debian Project's Qt/KDE teams are already preparing to remove Qt 4 support from the repositories of the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series mainly because it's getting harder and harder to maintain it now that it is no longer supported upstream, and may cause lots of problems system-wide.
"Currently Qt 4 has been dead upstream, and we are starting to have problems maintaining it, like for example in the OpenSSL 1.1 support case," said Simon Quigley in the bug report. "No new packages entering the Ubuntu archive should depend on qt4-x11 or any package which directly or indirectly depends on it."
At the moment there are over 330 packages flagged for removal, including big names like LibreOffice (libreoffice-kde), LightDM, and all of the KDE 4 Stack. These will be removed if they aren't upgraded to a version based on the Qt 5 framework, but the team is also currently purging obsolete packages that haven't been maintained in years.
All app maintainers are urged to port their packages to Qt 5
This is a call for developers to start porting their Qt 4 apps or any other packages that depend on qt4-x11, directly or indirectly, to the latest Qt 5 framework, which is fully supported on current and future releases of Ubuntu. Developers must upload Qt 5 versions of their apps to the development release before Ubuntu 19.04.
Right now, Canonical prepares to release its seventh LTS (Long Term Support) release, the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), which will still support Qt 4 apps, especially that numerous Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users plan to upgrade to it, but Ubuntu 18.10 could be the first release to ship without Qt 4 support.
Of course, the removal of Qt 4 support would have a bigger impact on Ubuntu flavors like Kubuntu or Lubuntu Next, as they rely on the Qt/KDE technologies more than Ubuntu does, which uses the GTK+-based GNOME Stack. But it's an excellent move as the Linux world needs to adapt to new and more powerful technologies, always.